99Bitcoins Exclusive: Zodia Markets Co-founder Nick Philpott Says, “If you wait for the regulator, you’ll have no innovation at all”

Nick Philpott, Co-founder of Zodia Markets – a digital asset trading business that has a strong backing from traditional financial giants like the British Bank, Standard Chartered Bank – has a controversial take on the need of regulatory clarity. Speaking during the Nordic Blockchain Association on 17 June 2025 he said that most regulations just synthesize down to don’t lie, don’t cheat, and don’t steal.

“Saying that you need to wait for the regulator to say ‘yes, you can do this or that” means you’ll have no innovation at all,” insisted Philpott.

Talking about stablecoins specifically he said, “Stablecoins are definitionally cross-border.” However, expressing concerns about Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), he said, “One of my biggest concerns around MiCA is that there are definitely traces of protectionism in there, trying to put the walls up, trying to promote the adoption of Euro stablecoins. I get it. But the problem is if you put walls up in a world that is globalizing, that has a tool, that is definitionally global, then you’re going to cut yourselves off from quite a lot of those opportunities.”

“The way I think about things like USDC or Tether particularly, is that they’re Eurodollars. We’ve had Eurodollars since the 1950s. Tether is issued by an El Salvadorian company. It’s not issued out of the US. So it is international by design.”

“EU is almost a victim of its own success,” Says Zodia Markets Co-founder

“If you come from an institutional background that we do, actually there’s quite a lot of regulations that you can just draw from to run a business pretty well. You don’t necessarily need to wait for the regulators to actually write a licensing framework. We’re a UK-based company, still not regulated. Regulators haven’t written the regulations yet.”

Talking about payments in the EU, he said it actually work pretty well. “SEPA is good, Target 2 is good, instant payments is pretty good. Banks are okay.”

But, according to him the EU is a victim of its own success. “To illustrate,” he said “Zodia Markets, our number one currency in terms of stablecoin volumes is the US dollar stablecoins. Number two is Turkish Lira. We do more volume in the one Turkish Lira stablecoin than we do in all the Euro stablecoins combined by a factor of 100. Because settling Turkish Lira is not that easy. Getting a Turkish Lira bank account offshore – it’s not that easy. But you can hold Turkish Lira stablecoins pretty much anywhere you want to go.”

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Cash is “Slow, Unpredictable and Expensive”

Talking in favour of interoperability, he said that it is probably the more important thing in the near term. “If you run a crypto business like we do, the biggest problem you have running that is cash. It’s slow, it’s pretty unpredictable, it’s definitely expensive. It doesn’t work at weekends. It stops working in the evening. If we ran email the same way we run cross-border payments, you wouldn’t be able to send an email after 5 pm. If I have Hotmail and the these guys have Gmail, I can’t email them. And so on and so forth. We don’t run email like that because that would be insane,” he pointed out.

“If you’re able to take cash and different assets and put it onto the open internet, then that offers the opportunity of interoperability. One of the simplest use cases that we’re seeing, because we work in wholesale markets rather than retail card payments or on the retail side, is cross-border trade. Now, if you’re trying to just move a cargo container of something from A to B, that can’t talk to the cash,” he added.

“And in terms of cross-border trade, it’s not so much like finance where you’re trying to bring financial infrastructure from the 19th, the 20th century into the 21st century. Trade, you’re coming from the 17th century to the 21st century. The leap is absolutely dramatic.”

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Use Cases of Stablecoins “Boggles the Mind”

“Stablecoins are particularly useful for the 20% of situations that cause you 80% of the anxiety, pain, and grief.”

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“I don’t see a huge amount of programmability yet because the incremental improvements on using cash for the various different examples that have been given, are already so profound that I think a lot of players are still just grappling with the implications of that. We have two clients that are remittance companies and for them it’s a balance sheet play. So if you’re a taxi driver here and you’re sending money home to Nigeria, then the remittance companies give the impression of an instant payout by holding huge amounts of Nigerian Naira in Nigerian banks. Nigerian banks are pretty risky. The Nigerian Naira depreciated by 80% last year. It’s a pretty expensive solution. And getting access to dollar banking in Nigeria is far from easy. So sending stablecoins to Nigeria is far, far faster.”

“On the cross-border shipping side, we’re working with a very, very large port operator with our sister company, Zodia Custody. They already have a platform that allows the tracking of supply chain, so you can see where your cargo container is. The problem is talking to the banks, knowing where your money is, how you’re paying for the truck, how are you paying for the 120 million dollars of crude oil on the tanker. You can’t speak to the banks, you certainly can’t speak to the central banks.”

Standard Chartered has Seen the Digitization of Payments

I suspect that some US banks in particular are probably not feeling that same pressure. I was in the US recently and I saw people paying for stuff with paper checks. I thought I’d wandered back into the ’90s. That sort of thing is still acceptable in the US. So they’re not feeling the same pressure.

Talking about technology, he said, “2018, I was in the electronic trading team at Standard Chartered. We did a Bitcoin test trade. It was like rolling a wrecking ball through the systems. It broke every system it touched, including the general ledger. We’ve never broken that before. That was when we realized that we weren’t going to be able to put crypto into the traditional banking systems. So we set up Zodia Custody and Zodia Markets in sequence.”

“I’m not convinced that CBDCs have a cross-border application”

“I’m not convinced that central bank digital currencies have a cross-border application because you’d need to network up all of the different currencies,” he said. “That’s 180 currencies, so that’s like 16-ish thousand bilateral combinations.”

“CLS, which is a system that’s used to remove settlement risk in foreign exchange, has been trying to network up central bank systems since 2002. It’s done 18 currencies so far. So at the current pace, they’ll do the other 172 in about 200 years time. It’s not going to happen.”

“Does the world really need 180 currencies? Would we notice if we lost the Tigrinya, the Guarani, the Panga, um the Manat, the Tenge? People are sitting there Googling. Is he making these up? They’re all real currencies. I don’t think people would notice if they disappeared.”

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